Understanding Stress: Symptoms, Signs, Causes, and Effects. What is stress? The Body’s Stress Response When you perceive a threat, your nervous system responds by releasing a flood of stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones rouse the body for emergency action. Your heart pounds faster, muscles tighten, blood pressure rises, breath quickens, and your senses become sharper. Stress is a normal physical response to events that make you feel threatened or upset your balance in some way. The stress response is the body’s way of protecting you. The stress response also helps you rise to meet challenges. But beyond a certain point, stress stops being helpful and starts causing major damage to your health, your mood, your productivity, your relationships, and your quality of life. How do you respond to stress? It's important to learn how to recognize when your stress levels are out of control.
The signs and symptoms of stress overload can be almost anything. Stress doesn’t always look stressful Signs and symptoms of stress overload. What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space. Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations.
When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. Even at our bedside, we now have our iPads with heaps of digital apps and the world’s information at our fingertips. There has been much discussion about the value of the “creative pause” – a state described as “the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether.” However, despite the incredible power and potential of sacred spaces, they are quickly becoming extinct. Why do we crave distraction over downtime?
Why do we give up our sacred space so easily? We are depriving ourselves of every opportunity for disconnection. 1. 2. 3. 4. 120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power. Here are 120 things you can do starting today to help you think faster, improve memory, comprehend information better and unleash your brain’s full potential. Solve puzzles and brainteasers.Cultivate ambidexterity. Use your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, comb your hair or use the mouse. Write with both hands simultaneously. Switch hands for knife and fork.Embrace ambiguity.
Learn to enjoy things like paradoxes and optical illusions.Learn mind mapping.Block one or more senses. Eat blindfolded, wear earplugs, shower with your eyes closed.Develop comparative tasting. Learn to properly taste wine, chocolate, beer, cheese or anything else.Find intersections between seemingly unrelated topics.Learn to use different keyboard layouts. Readers’ Contributions Dance! Contribute your own tip! There are many, many ways to keep our brains sharp. Defenses Against Stress - Stress Management Techniques from Mind Tools. Journal to the Self: 13 Tools to Make Journaling Work for You. In this post, I present 13 specific journaling tools you can start using immediately, along with a mind map of the book ‘Journal to the Self: Twenty-Two Paths to Personal Growth‘.
Journaling is perhaps the most effective and direct way to get a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you. By putting your thoughts in writing, you trigger some unique mental processes that often lead to invaluable new insights. In the book Journal to the Self, Kathleen Adams presents many tools that make the process of journaling much easier and enjoyable, presenting plenty of choices to make journaling work for you. Regardless of your writing style (or even if you see yourself as someone who doesn’t enjoy writing at all), you’ll find tips to make your self-discovery journey more effective and enjoyable.
Journaling Tools The Journaling Toolbox is the meat of Journal to the Self. Springboards: These are ready-made phrases that answer the question "What should I write about? ". Now to the Full Book. Build Brain Power with these 21 Resources. Reading Strategies - Learning Skills from MindTools. Reading Efficiently by Reading Intelligently Get the most from your reading. © iStockphoto/mammamaart Whether they're project documents, trade journals, blogs, business books or ebooks, most of us read regularly as part of our jobs, and to develop our skills and knowledge. But do you ever read what should be a useful document, yet fail to gain any helpful information from it? Or, do you have to re-read something several times to get a full understanding of the content? In this article, we're looking at strategies that will help you read more effectively.
Think About What You Want to Know Before you start reading anything, ask yourself why you're reading it. Once you know your purpose, you can examine the resource to see whether it's going to help you. For example, with a book, an easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings. Ask yourself whether the resource meets your needs, and try to work out if it will give you the right amount of knowledge. Read Actively. Exercises for Better Focus and Concentration | Personal development for a perfect life. Solve Your Problems Simply by Saying Them Out Loud. How many times have you gone through explaining a problem to a friend, and before he could say a word about it you had already figured out the solution by yourself?
The very act of explaining a problem out loud can, by itself, be enough to solve it. How can this deceptively simple strategy work so well? How can we leverage it, transforming it in a problem-solving technique we can use at anytime? The Magic Behind Explaining Problems Out Loud Communicating your problems out loud has several advantages over silently thinking about them: 1. Clarifying Your Thoughts In order to put your problem in a communicable form you must clarify it, stating it in objective terms. Putting your problem in words will tremendously help you grasp it: language is not only a tool of communication as many believe, but also a tool of thought (for more on that, check ‘Top 3 Reasons to Improve Your Vocabulary‘). 2. 3.
Saying the problem out loud engages many more areas of the brain than merely thinking about it. Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success. Nine Things Successful People Do Differently - Heidi Grant Halvorson -... - StumbleUpon. Learn more about the science of success with Heidi Grant Halvorson’s HBR Single, based on this blog post. Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren’t sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do. 1.
To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. 3. Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. 7. 8. 9. Little Words with Absolutely Huge Meaning - Use Them. As children many of us hyped the statement, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Clearly, it doesn’t take long to realize that words have far more weight than we want to realize.
They influence thoughts, feelings, actions and states of mind. Even little words often have big meaning. Think about it. The simplest little words, which we take for granted, have the power to hurt or heal, to inspire or discourage, to help or to hinder. The list below includes 18 examples of little words that have big meaning in the most positive way. Thank youBecause every single one of us longs to feel appreciated, words of gratitude make the heart sing.
I hope you’ve enjoyed these little words with big meaning. Become Who You Want To Be. Brain Fitness And Memory Programs, Brain Training - CogniFit.